2024

BERNHARD EITEL (1959)

was the rector of Heidelberg University between 2007 and 2023. He is a globally renowned representative of geomorphology, soil geography, and geoarchaeology, i.e., the archaeological application of geographical and earth science methods. During his term of office, the cooperation between Heidelberg University and Eötvös Loránd University, founded on one of our university’s first Western European contractual relations established before 1989, was further strengthened. As a geographer, Bernhard Eitel plays a vital role in the life of the Institute of Geography at Heidelberg University, which has long had close research and mobility relations with the Center for Geography at Eötvös Loránd University. 

Our interview with him is available on this link

 

 

SVEND HANSEN (1962)

is a respected member of the European archaeological community and a renowned researcher. He is a professor at Freie Universität Berlin and the first Director of the Eurasia-Ddepartment of the German Archaeological Institute, author of hundreds of scientific publications, and editor of books and journals. His research focuses on prehistoric metalworking, with a significant emphasis on the study of artifacts excavated in the Carpathian Basin. He has supported Hungarian archaeology for decades, supervised the completion of dozens of theses and doctoral dissertations based on prehistoric archaeological material from Hungary. Thanks to his support, several students, lecturers, and researchers from the Institute of Archaeology at ELTE have received scholarships to various European countries.

Our interview with him is available on this link

IVICS ZOLTÁN (1964)

is the Head of the Medical Biotechnology Division of the Paul Ehrlich Institute (in Langen, Germany), a research professor studying the evolution, molecular biology and genetic technology applications of mobile genetic elements (transposons). He is one of the inventors of the Sleeping Beauty transposon system, which revolutionized the technological platforms of genetic modifications in vertebrate model systems. He is a leading figure in the gene and cell therapy scientific community in Germany and Europe, a recognized lecturer at Goethe University in Frankfurt, organizer and lecturer at numerous international conferences. 

Our interview with him is available on this link

 

 

KRISTIE LONG FOLEY

works at Wake Forest University, USA: she is the founder and head of the Department of Implementation Science, professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Health Policy, and currently Vice Dean for Research Strategy and Integration. Her main area of interest is the practical application of healthcare and public healthcare scientific methods, strategies and knowledge, with her research in particular focusing on the connection between social differences and psycho-social interventions in the prevention, screening and treatment of cancer. In Hungary, her work has been highly influential in laying the foundation for research on smoking and for developing interventions. For the last two decades, she has maintained a close working relationship with ELTE-affiliated and other local researchers; several co-authored publications have resulted from these collaborations. Her involvement provides immense help towards the development and the grant activity of the Institute of Psychology and the academic field of health psychology and health science in general.

Read our interview with her HERE!

JEREMY WEBBER

is a leading scholar of constitutional law. He has written extensively in legal theory, constitutional theory, indigenous rights, federalism, cultural diversity, and constitutional law. As author and editor of numerous articles, special issues, edited volumes and monographs, his impact on the international scholarly discourse in this field is outstanding. Professor Webber has held important positions in academic life. He has been Dean of the University of Victoria (Canada) and the University of Sydney (Australia), and Professor at the University of Victoria, McGill University, and the University of Sydney, as well as visiting professor at several other prestigious universities, including the University of Melbourne and New South Wales. Professor Webber is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Our interview with him is available on this link

 

2023

GIAN VITTORIO CAPRARA (1944)

Gian Vittorio Caprara is a worldwide acknowledged and cited contemporary European representative of researchers of the field of personality psychology, and Professor Emeritus at La Sapienza University of Rome. He has been collaborating with researchers from the Institute of Psychology at ELTE since the 1980s: under his direction, the Positive Psychology Research Group is currently conducting research, testing the domestic applicability of the Positivity Scale and the validity of the measurement tool.

You can find our interview with him titled "There is a great need of true knowledge at service of the common good"  HERE.

2022

KARIKÓ KATALIN (1955)

is a research biologist, biochemist, senior vice president at the German biotechnology company called BioNTech, and research professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work was fundamental in the rapid development of an effective vaccine against Covid-19, which saved the lives of millions of people worldwide and opened new horizons in the development of further revolutionary medical procedures. The professor is one of the most influential scientists living today. Among researchers coming from Hungary, the impact of her work is comparable to that of the Nobel laureates.

Scientific symposium with Katalin Karikó

JEAN-PIERRE GOUDAILLIER (1949)

Jean-Pierre Goudaillier is a leading authority in European slang research. He is retired professor of linguistics at the Sorbonne, current honorary dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Université Paris Descartes, honorary president of the European Association of Francophone Slang Researchers, knight of the French Order of Honor. He became known for his experimental and functional phonetic studies, and since then he has become an internationally renowned researcher of today's suburban French language and the theoretical founder of the relevant studies. In 1986, he and his partner founded and until 2009 led the international slang research group, Center de Recherches Argotologiques, Comment tu tchatches! (1997), a dictionary based on suburban fieldwork, is an important work about French slang research. From the 2000s until today, he created a very active European slang research network, which Eötvös Loránd University was one of the first to join. He maintains an intensive relationship with the Department of French Language and Literature of ELTE. He has given numerous lectures at our university, and since the mid-2000s he has been a member of the scientific council of the ELTE Inter-University French Center and the Revue d'Études Françaises journal edited at ELTE. He did a lot to strengthen ELTE's international network of contacts, European presence and authority in his research field.

CHRISTOPH GRABENWARTER (1966)

 is President of the Constitutional Court of Austria, a leading authority in the sciences of European law, international law, and constitutional law, with special regard to the protection of human rights. In addition to protecting human rights, he is engaged in many other areas of public law, including international economic law and ecclesiastical law. His organizational activity has a major impact on science and practice, alike. He is the founder and organizer of the Association of European Constitutional Courts bringing together the major constitutional courts of Europe, the Court of Justice of the European Union, and jurisprudence.

You can find our interview with him titled "European constitutional identity leaves room for the diversity of the Member States" HERE.

HUNYADY GYÖRGY (1942)

introduced social psychology to Hungary and introduced generations of young professionals to the international mainstream of the field at ELTE. His research areas are social cognition, the world of experience of social relations, national consciousness, social well-being and public thinking, counter-selection. Many later studies were based on his summary monograph (Stereotypies in changing public thinking), and his oeuvre was later completed in volumes dealing with political, legal and economic psychology. He has been teaching at ELTE since 1977, and was appointed university professor in 1988. For decades, he head of the Department of Social and Educational Psychology, from 1993 to 2007 he managed the Departments related to Psychology at ELTE, then they became an institute. Between 1989 and 1992 he was the dean of ELTE Faculty of Humanities, between 2003 and 2007 he was the founding dean of the Faculty of Pedagogy and Psychology of ELTE. To this day, he is an active participant in the Faculty of Pedagogy and Psychology's doctoral courses. In 2001, he was elected a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Hundreds of scientific books, studies, technical writings, and textbooks are associated with his name. He is the founder of the journal Applied Psychology, and from 2016 he was the chairman of the editorial board of the Hungarian Psychological Review.

You can find our interview with him titled "I am interested in the psychological consequences of historical changes" HERE. 

EVANGELOS LIVIERATOS (1948)

is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Geodesy and Cartography of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He obtained his degree at the National Technical University of Athens and his PhD at the University of Uppsala. He got a research fellowship and was guest lecturer in the United States and in many European countries. He is the founder of the Greek Cartographic Society, the founding editor of the international open access journal e-Perimetron and a honorary member of the International Cartographic Association. He was also Minister of Environment, Energy and Climate Change. During his research, he was initially most interested in the mathematical and physical foundations of cartography and geodesy, later his interest turned to cartographic heritage and digital humanities. Within the International Cartographic Association, he founded the committee dealing with the digitization of old maps. During his work there, he came into contact with ELTE in 2014, and since then he has been collaborating with our university at conferences and in numerous joint research projects. He was also the driving force behind the establishment of the Erasmus partnership between the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and ELTE. His main objective is to connect engineering and the humanities with the tools of digitalization in the fields of thinking, learning and research.

You can find our interview with him titled "Geodetic thinking, engineering background, cultural interests" HERE.

FRANCISCO MARCO SIMÓN (1949)

is Professor Emeritus at the University of Zaragoza. His research is focused on classical antiquity. He is most interested in the history of Roman and Celtic religions in the provinces of the Roman Empire, including the province of Hispania, as well as the textual and inscriptive environment and iconography of ancient religions. Most recently, he has explored the contexts of Roman magic in terms of doubt, anxiety, and fear. 

You can find our interview with him titled "Synergy is fundamental in researc" HERE

2021

Johannes Hahn (1957)

His fields of research are the Age of the Roman emperors, the cultural, religious, and social history of Late Antiquity. Within the history of religion, the history of Judaism and early Christianity constitute the main subject of his works. Another focus area is early Hellenism in the eastern Mediterranean, as well as ancient medical history. He studied philosophy, history, and archaeology at the Universities of Munich, Heidelberg, and Oxford. In 1986, he earned his doctorate in Heidelberg as a student of Géza Alföldy. Subsequently, he became a staff member at his professor’s department. It was from there that, after his habilitation, he left for the University of Münster as a university professor. He is one of the editors of the international series Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum, Historische Studien, and Religions in the Graeco-Roman World. He has multiple connections with Hungary and ELTE. Before the launch of the Erasmus network, he had already hosted in Münster many students and university colleagues arriving from Budapest and gave several lectures at the ELTE Institute of Archaeology. In 2015, he came to Budapest as a visiting professor..

You can find our interview with him titled "During my career I have always tried to promote young students" HERE.

John T. Jost (1968)

He is one of the most widely known, most published, and most decisive political psychologists in the world today. He earned his degree in psychology from Duke University in 1989 and received his PhD at Yale University in 1995. He has been a professor at New York University since 2003. He is the author of seven books and nearly 400 publications, with over 60,000 citations. He developed the Theory of System Justification, according to which people are motivated to defend, explain, and maintain the current social, economic, and political system for their sense of certainty, security, and shared reality. His most cited study explores the processes of motivated social cognition that define political conservatism. Since 2010, he has been working closely with the staff of the Department of Social Psychology at ELTE, which resulted in several joint publications, and he was a guest lecturer at the Faculty of Education and Psychology on several occasions. Intense cooperation with him has considerably fostered the development of the study of social psychology and the international collaboration activities of the Faculty. 

You can find our interview with him titled "We should be careful about which social systems we are justifying" HERE.

Francisco Pina Polo (1959)

He is an internationally renowned researcher of the history of the Late Republic of Rome, the operation of political practice and the institutional systems of politics, as well as the role of orators giving speeches to the public. He is a member of the classicist workshop simply referred to as the “School of Zaragoza” by the scholars of Classical Studies in Spain. He received his PhD from the University of Zaragoza in 1988. Since the beginning of his career, not only has he regularly published his studies and books in German and English in addition to Spanish, but has also been a lecturer at prestigious conferences. As a scholarship holder, researcher and visiting professor, he has often visited major classicist workshops around the world. In 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2016 he was a visiting professor at the ELTE Department of Classical Archaeology. In the framework of the Erasmus bilateral agreement, students from Zaragoza came to ELTE regularly, and ELTE students were invited to Zaragoza for one semester each.

 You can find our interview with him titled "University work must be based above all on universalism and internationalism" HERE. 

Andreas Voẞkuhle (1963)

He studied law in Munich and Bayreuth. Since 1999, he has been a professor at the Faculty of Law of the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg and was the dean of the Faculty from 2004 to 2006. He has been an ordinary member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences since 2007. In the same year, he was also elected rector of the Albert Ludwig University – as the youngest professor ever. In 2008, he was elected a member and vice-president of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, and from 2010 to 2020 he was – again the youngest ever – president of the court. His professional work covers several areas of public law. He publishes his works in the fields of constitutional law, administrative law, and public administration, as well as the philosophy of law at an equally high level. He is a key actor in the scientific process aimed at the renewal of public administration in Germany, and he also plays a major role in the development of the study of German constitutional law. Since he was elected a judge of the Federal Constitutional Court, he has been the main promoter of a constitutional dialogue. He has always been committed to the advancement of constitutional justice in Hungary and has had a close professional relationship with the Constitutional Court of Hungary.

2020

Armin von Bogdandy (1960)

Professor Armin von Bogdandy is a most recognized expert and a spearhead of public international law and the law of the European Union, a public lawyer with outstanding results achieved. He graduated in law and philosophy in Freiburg in 1984. He is professor at Goethe University in Frankfurt since 1997 and director of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public and International Law in Heidelberg since 2002. He specializes in the general features of public law, with a focus on its structural change. He has achieved outstanding theoretical, doctrinal, or practical results. Professor von Bogdandy has a close relationship with our Faculty for more than a decade now and is supporting us in both research and teaching. He is a regular speaker at ELTE’s scientific events which deal with human rights or the law of the European Union. Since the beginnings in 2015, he regularly offers lectures at ELTE’s European Human Rights LL.M. programme and we have also had the pleasure to welcome him as an expert on several projects.

Wim van den Brink (1952)

Wim van den Brink ( born 1 952) is Professor of Psychiatry and A ddiction at the Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam. After his training as a psychiatric epidemiologist in Groningen and New York, he received his PhD from the State University of Groningen in 1989. Since 1992 he is full professor of Addiction Psychiatry at the Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam. Professor van den Brink’s main scientific interests are related to the neurobiology of substance use disorders and other addictive behaviors, the pharmacological and psychological treatment of substance use disorders and related comorbidities, and the reduction of stigma regarding patients with an addiction. Since 2002 Professor van den Brink developed a strong collaboration with the Department of Clinical Psychology and Addiction, Institute of Psychology of ELTE. In the framework of this collaboration the annual conference of the European Association of Substance Abuse Research has been organized two times in Hungary, important meetings of the ICASA network took place in Budapest. Numerous research papers have been published as result of collaborative research and doctoral student exchange could become part of these

You can find our interview with him titled "Addiction is a treatable disease" HERE.

Cséfalvay Zsolt (1959)

Professor Zsolt Cséfalvay is an internationally recognized researcher in the field of speech therapy, as well as a professor in the Department of Speech Therapy at the Faculty of Pedagogy of Comenius University in Bratislava. Within the field of speech therapy, clinical speech therapy has played a key role – not only in terms of development, research and university curriculum, but also in the diagnosis and therapy of neurogenic speech and language disorders. He is a published author on aphasia in neurological books, which has led to teamwork with representatives of the medical community as equals. This is reflected the inclusion of a speech therapist as a member of the professional team performing brain tumour surgeries in Slovakia (and for the first time in the world). He maintains contact with the colleagues at Bárczi Gusztáv Faculty of Special Needs Education of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), thus he actively contributes to professional development in Hungary, mainly in the fields of aphasia therapy, communication disorders related to neurodegenerative diseases, and alternative and augmentative communication.

Marie-Vic Ozouf-Marignier (1957)

Marie-Vic Ozouf-Marignier, geographer-historian, is a professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her primary focus is on the one hand the different forms of territorial identity, and the history of their evolution between the 18th and the 20th century. On the other hand, her other major field of research consists of the politics of French and European regional development, questions of the political division of space, and the problem of regionalism. She works on the different mental representations of space and the history of cartographical representations. Furthermore, she is conducting prominent research in the field of the history of geography. For more than two decades, she has played a vital role in establishing and maintaining fruitful relations between the Faculty of Arts of ELTE and the EHESS. She is generously contributing to educational and academic cooperation, and to the talent management and education of Hungarian students, doctoral students and young researchers.

Simon Thompson

Professor Simon Thompson graduated from the University of Cambridge, and received his PhD in mathematics from the University of Oxford in 1984. He has been a lecturer at the University of Kent since 1983 and a full professor since 2000. From 2002 to 2010, he was head of the School of Computing; then worked as a research director between 2011 and 2015, and as a chief innovation officer from 2015 to 2018. He is a prominent researcher in the field of Functional Programming, and the author of several widely known books and of about 150 scientific articles. Since 2007 he has been collaborating with the Department of Programming Languages and Compilers of the Faculty of Informatics, Eötvös Loránd University in the field of R&D&I as well as in education. Students of the Faculty of Informatics, Eötvös Loránd University have had the opportunity to participate in the research conducted by Prof. Thompson since 2007, and for a year he has been a part-time research professor at the Faculty. For almost two decades, Prof. Simon Thompson has been playing a key role in increasing scientific efficiency and improving the supply of researchers at the Faculty of Informatics, Eötvös Loránd University. 

You can find our interview with him titled "Friendly rivalry worked to spur us both on" HERE.

2019

Claus von Carnap-Bornheim (1957)

Claus von Carnap-Bornheim is a researcher of European reputation specialized in the archaeology of the Barbarians in the Roman Imperial Period, as well as a museum organizer, and a full member of the German Archaeological Institute. His investigations are focused on the culture, social organisation, economy, daily life, and extended connections of the Barbarians (Germanic and Baltic peoples, Iranian Sarmatians, and nomadic peoples from the Eurasian Steppe) living on the edges of the Roman Empire. Since 1985, he has been a member of the research team processing the world-famous finds discovered at the sacrificial bog-sites of Illerup, in Denmark. The professor also organises research and teaching fellowships for young scholars coming from East Central and Eastern Europe, including the faculty members of ELTE. His most outstanding achievement in the field of scientific management was the establishment of an innovative archaeological and historical research institute, the Zentrum für Baltische und Skandinavische Archäologie im Archäologischen Landesmuseum Schleswig in 2008. He was a guest professor at universities in our region, including ELTE, and played a major role in promoting research in Eastern Europe by bringing together scholars working at different archaeological institutions. 

Marc Nicholas Potenza (1965)

Marc Nicholas Potenza is a psychiatrist and addictologist, as well as the founder and leader of several research teams at Yale University. He has been investigating addictive behaviours and disorders, dependence on psychoactive substances, and gender-related differences in the processes for over twenty years. He is a clinician-researcher exploring the intergenerational aspects of addiction, including exposure to drug during the prenatal period. His fields of research encompass the study of impulsive-compulsive disorders, investigations of video-game playing addictive behaviours, as well as hypersexuality. He has been working closely with the Department of Clinical Psychology and Addiction at the ELTE Faculty of Education and Psychology for many years now. He participated in launching the Journal of Behavioural Addictions at ELTE in 2011, which has become a leading journal in the field of addictology. Furthermore, several professors and doctoral candidates of the faculty were successfully involved in his research projects. He has received many prestigious awards for his work, and authored or co-authored more than 400 journal articles.

Rudolf Welser (1939)

Rudolf Welser is an internationally renowned expert of private law in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1971, he was elected a full professor at the University of Vienna, and he was the chairman of the prestigious Institute for Civil Law for nearly four decades. Between 1981 and 1983, he was Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Vienna. His scholarly interests are focused on contract law and inheritance law, but he has also addressed several other important questions related to private law. The two-volume monograph on Austrian private law, authored by him and Helmut Koziol, an Honorary Doctor of our university, is of paramount importance. Rudolf Welser has greatly contributed to the legislative preparatory work of the Austrian Ministry of Justice with his expertise. His studies submitted to the reforms of the law of warranty and guarantee and the law of inheritance in the Civil Code of Austria are also highly significant. In 2007, he founded the Centre for European Legal Development and Private Law Reform, which aims primarily at comparing the development of the different systems of private law in Central and Eastern Europe. Several Hungarian professors are involved in the work of the research centre, mainly from our university.

You can find our interview with him titled "The legal culture of the different legal systems should be preserved" HERE.

Charles Withers (1954)

Charles Withers is one of the most distinguished British geographers, fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy. In addition to other professional awards, he is holder of the title of Geographer Royal for Scotland that was conferred on him by the British monarch and the Scottish Parliament in 2015. He is the only scholar to hold this recognition. He defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge in 1981. Between 1980 and 1994, he was a lecturer at the Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education. Since 1994, he has been a professor at the University of Edinburgh. His fields of research encompass cultural geography, historical geography, and the history of geographical science. He has authored outstanding publications on the history of science during the Age of Enlightenment and geographical science in the nineteenth century. He is the author or co-author of more than ten monographs. Charles Withers has worked with the researchers of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at the ELTE Faculty of Science in the fields of historical geography and the history geographical science for decades. The professor is a recurrent guest in Budapest. He has attended several international conferences and professional events organised by our university.

You can find our interview with him titled "Addressing important questions from geographical perspectives" HERE.

2018

Hugh Beale (1948)

Hugh Beale is Professor at the University of Warwick. He is a senior research fellow at the Harris Manchester College of the University of Oxford, a fellow of the British Academy, and an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is an acknowledged expert and leader of the European Civil Law and Contract Law. His scholarly activity is outstanding: he is a principal investigator and commentator in the fields of European Civil Law and Contract Law. His most important works include the editing and publication of the „Principles of European Contract Law: Parts I & II” (2000). As a member of the Expert Group he drafted the “Common European Sales Law” proposal initiated by the European Commission. From 1999 to 2008, he was the member of the Coordinating Committee for the European Civil Code project. From 2002 to 2004, he was the British chief coordinator for the Hungarian-British Joint Academic Research Programme coordinated by the University of Warwick and the Eötvös Loránd University, and provided expertise for the committee responsible for the reformation of the Hungarian Civil Code. 

José Jackson Coelho Sampaio (1950)

José Jackson Coelho Sampaio is Rector of the Ceara State University. His scientific career has always been directed by the core of medical profession, a humanist concern, and the imperative of caring for people, which is clearly shown by his extensive educational activities as well. He has undertaken a leading role in the historical process of reforming psychiatry in Brazil. He worked as a psychiatrist in several institutions across the country, due to which he gained extensive professional experience. His research and publications focus primarily on epidemiology, health policy, mental health and the health of workers. He has been presented with numerous awards and medals for his professional and academic activities. As the rector of the Ceara University, he lays great emphasis on the development of technological innovation and international relations, such as the establishment of a lectorate responsible for teaching Hungarian language and culture, which is the second such institute in Brazil.

Georg Gartner (1966)

Georg Gartner is a cartographer and professor at the Vienna University of Technology. From 2008 to 2014, he was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Geoinformation at the university. His main international professional activity is related to the International Cartographic Association. He has taken part in several projects of the association (Cartography and the Internet, Protection of the Cartographic Heritage, and Location-Based Services). In the last 10–15 years, many professional conferences have been organised with his contribution, which have also provided excellent opportunities for researchers affiliated with the Eötvös Loránd University. Since 2004, researchers from the ELTE Faculty of Informatics have been attending the Location-Based Services Conference initiated by him. In 2008, they delivered lectures at the first Cartography and Art workshop hosted by cartographers in Vienna supervised by Gartner. They also attended the first conference titled Cartography in Eastern and Central Europe in 2009, as well as the highly successful EuroCarto conference in 2015. The faculty members and doctoral candidates of Eötvös Loránd University were occasionally engaged in the organisation of major events held by the Association.

Aviv Malkiel Weinstein  (1961)

Aviv Malkiel Weinstein is Head of the Integrative Brain Science Centre at the Department of Behavioural Sciences of the Ariel University. Over the past 20 years, he has conducted outstanding, internationally prominent research on psychological, psychopharmacological and neurobiological mechanisms with brain imaging techniques, and their applications in the treatment of addicted patients. His investigations cover the psychological and neurological components of craving and withdrawal. He established the first brain-imaging laboratory in Israel, in the framework of which thorough investigations have been carried out into the effects of certain psychoactive substances, such as ecstasy and cannabis, on cognitive and motor functions in the so-called recreational users. In recent years his research activity has concentrated on behavioural addictions, particularly gambling, compulsive shopping, hypersexuality and exercise addiction.

Rainer Weiss (1932)

Nobel-laureate Rainer Weiss is an astrophysicist and Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the co-founder and intellectual leader of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) that the ELTE team joined in 2007. Since then, ELTE and LSC have renewed their scientific cooperation agreement every summer. As a result of this, more than 100 scientific studies with over 500 cumulative impact factors have been co-authored by our university, which have received more than 10,000 citations. Within the frames of this cooperation, not only the ELTE faculty members and researchers, but also Master's and Doctoral students had the possibility to visit Boston (MIT) and Pasadena (CalTech) on several occasions. Rainer Weiss continuously followed and supported the work of the ELTE LIGO team, particularly the development and installation of infrasound microphones at the LIGO observatories in the United States. Additionally, he still helps the development of an instrument designed at the ELTE Faculty of Science for detecting airborne infrasound, which is of considerable importance for the issue of the so-called gravity gradient noise. He also referred to the importance of the related results achieved at ELTE in his Nobel Lecture delivered at Stockholm University.

You can find our interview with him titled "A new window to the universe" HERE.

Waldemar  Zacharasiewicz (1942)

Waldemar Zacharasiewicz is Professor Emeritus at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna, and a full member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The focus of his activity is on national and international imagology, and in particular the national images of America and in America, the perception of the “other” country, the literature of the American South, and images of Germany in America, but he also studies the role of “climate theory” in English literature. He published seven monographs as a single author and another sixteen volumes with co-editors. His publications cover various areas of connections and interactions between America and Europe. Over the past decades, he has established a widespread nexus in Hungary, including our university, which has been extremely advantageous for Hungary. His comprehensive and profound knowledge about North American literature, culture and history, and his great competence in historical theory and methodology make him one of the leading scholars in American and Canadian Studies in the world.

2017

Csiszár Imre (1938)

Imre Csiszár is a Professor Emeritus at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He graduated in mathematics from Eötvös Loránd University in 1961. Soon after his graduation, he joined the Research Institute of Mathematics (now: the Alfréd Rényi Research Institute of Mathematics at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), where he headed first the Information Theory Group and then the Stochastics Department. From 1972 to 2008, he was a full university professor at the Department of Probability Theory and Statistics of the Eötvös Loránd University, and he also lectured at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The research activities of the Rényi Institute Professor Emeritus cover a wide area. Although his early work was focused on information theory, he also had several notable achievements in the field of probability measures on groups. He later obtained outstanding results in the field of code theory as well. His book, co-authored by János Körner, provided basic knowledge for generations of mathematicians in the field of information theory. He has been a visiting professor at many foreign universities, and his work has been recognised with several academic prizes in Hungary and abroad.

Mark Griffiths (1966)

Mark Griffiths is a member of the British Psychological Society. His professional interest lies in behavioural addictions, especially gambling and video game addictions. He is one of the most renowned researchers in this field. He has contributed scientific articles to about 550 refereed journals and has authored five books and nearly 140 book chapters. He was an advisor to the Norwegian government and helped the work of the US committee on the impact of gambling addictions. His relationship with Eötvös Loránd University goes beyond mentoring doctoral candidates. He was actively engaged in the implementation of a lot of research collaboration and exchange programmes of students and faculty members between the two universities.

Mesterházi Zsuzsanna (1936)

Zsuzsanna Mesterházi is a Professor Emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University. She is an internationally renowned creator of a school, a teacher, and a researcher in the field of special needs education. As director-general, she led the predecessor institution of the Eötvös Loránd University Bárczi Gusztáv Faculty of Special Needs Education. Following the integration in 2000, she was the first head of the faculty and strived for that special needs education and its training, as well as the Faculty of Special Needs Education would gain a worthy rank and place in the diverse training and research portfolio of the country’s top university. She was actively engaged in creating a comprehensive spectrum of education at all three university levels. First, she launched the Bachelor’s programme followed by the Master's programme. Finally, she established and led the Special Needs Education doctoral programme as part of the Doctoral School of Educational Sciences at Eötvös Loránd University.

Miklós Szabó (1940)

Miklós Szabó obtained his degrees in archaeology and Latin from Eötvös Loránd University in 1963. He began his career at the Hungarian National Museum and continued it at the Collection of Classical Antiquities at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. From 1978 he taught part-time and from 1987 full-time at the ELTE Faculty of Humanities, where he established the Department of Classical Archaeology from the ground up. For ten years, he was the head of the Institute of Archaeological Sciences founded in 1995. From 1993 on, he was the Rector at the Eötvös Loránd University for two terms of office. His greatest achievement is developing a pioneering protocol adopted worldwide, which uses the research methods of classical archaeology for studying Celtic art. The excavations of the early imperial forum and basilica under his supervision in Bibracte, France, attracted special international attention.

2016

Xu Lin (1954)

Xu Lin is an acknowledged expert in international cooperation for the dissemination of the authentic Chinese language and the development and implementation of intercultural dialogue among cultures. She studied chemistry at Fudan University from 1972 to 1975. Afterwards, she earned a Master’s degree in economics from the Teacher Training University in Beijing. She is currently an honorary doctor at nine universities in different parts of the world. Since 2004, she has been the director of the Chinese Language Council (Hanban), which seeks to raise awareness of the Chinese language and culture, and promotes the teaching of the Chinese language in many countries around the world. At the initiative of Deputy Minister Xu Lin, the Confucius Institute at ELTE regularly receives donations of books. These increase the collection of Chinese books and textbooks held by the libraries of the Institute as well as forty-three other schools and universities where the instructors of the Confucius Institute teach. She also had an important role in the fact that the Institute has now a series of textbooks designed specifically for Hungarian students.

Klinghammer István (1941) 

István Klinghammer is the former rector of Eötvös Loránd University, a Professor Emeritus, a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and a prominent person in Hungarian and international cartography. Since 1965, he has been teaching at the Department of Cartography (later: the Department of Cartography and Geoinformatics), Eötvös Loránd University. He became an assistant professor in 1971 and an associate professor in 1980. In 1987, he was elected a full university professor, and at the same time, he was appointed the head of the Department of Cartography. He defended his academic doctoral dissertation in 1992. He was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2004 and became a full member in 2010. From 1983 to 1989 and from 1991 to 1994, he was the Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Science at Eötvös Loránd University. From 1989 to 1990, he was the Dean. From 1997, he was the Deputy Rector of Eötvös Loránd University. From 2000 on, he was the rector of the University for six consecutive years. In 2006, he received the Eötvös Ring, the highest recognition of our university. In 2011, he was awarded the Middle Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary (civil division). From 2013 to 2014, he was the Secretary of State for Higher Education.

Volker Lipp (1962) 

Volker Lipp is a professor at the Georg August University in Göttingen, the former Dean of the Faculty of Law, and an internationally renowned practitioner of civil law and civil procedural law. Born in 1962, he is currently Head of the Department of Civil Law, Civil Procedural Law, Medical Law, and Comparative Law and has been a professor at the institution in Göttingen since 2000. His scholarly work is immensely wide-ranging: in addition to the basic questions of private law and procedural law, his main fields of research involve civil law liability, medical liability, and the rules of civil procedure in family law matters. His decade-long continuous German-language teaching activity at the ELTE Faculty of Law is exemplary. He is also teaching at the ELTE-Göttingen Deutsche Rechtsschule, within the frames of which several ELTE students obtained their LLM degrees in Göttingen. He participated in the organisation of several inter-faculty scientific conferences and was the co-organiser of the Budapest-Göttingen Exchange Seminar on International and European Civil Procedural Law held three times. 

Αnasztasziosz Ioannisz Metaxasz (1940)

Anastasios Ioannis Metaxas is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Athens, the founder of the Institute of Political Science and the Political Communication Lab at the university, and a professor of Political Science. He is a member of the editorial boards of several European and American scientific journals, a member of the governing board of the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, and a curator of the Cavafy Archive. He had a fundamental role in the fact that the former Institute of Sociology at Eötvös Loránd University (later: the Institute of Sociology and Department of Minority Sociology at ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences) and the Institute of Political Science at the University of Athens have had teaching and research collaboration from the early 1990s onwards. Due to the first Tempus programme (1995–1999) and then the Erasmus programme, an intensive exchange of students and faculty members could start. The two universities also collaborate in the “Crisis and Social Innovations – Hungarian-Greek Comparative Social Dynamics” project of the MTA-ELTE Peripato Research Group led by Nikos Fokas.

Thomas Rauscher (1955) 

Thomas Rauscher is a professor at the University of Leipzig, the director of the Institute for Foreign and European Private and Procedural Law. He is an internationally renowned authority on private international law as well as international, European, and comparative procedural law. Since 1993, he has been a professor of international private law and procedural law at the University of Leipzig. He established the Institute for Foreign and European Private and Procedural Law at the same university. He is an eminent researcher in comparative and European civil procedural law, and editor-in-chief at a leading German commentary on the Code of Civil Procedure. For decades, he has been one of the leading European researchers of sharia and published his research results on the subject primarily in his works related to family law. He considerably contributed to the development of a close relationship between Eötvös Loránd University and the University of Leipzig. Furthermore, with the help of the University of Leipzig, he was one of the pioneers to involve the ELTE Faculty of Law in the Erasmus programme. He has been a guest lecturer at the Faculty of Law for decades.

2015

Erhard Busek (1941)

Erhard Busek, an Austrian politician, former Vice-Chancellor of the Republic of Austria, and a prominent figure in the unification of Central and Eastern European countries, has played an important role in European politics since the 1960s. As a leading member of the Austrian government, he was actively engaged in the changes of regime between 1989 and 1990. He was a valuable partner of the opposition movements in Budapest and the number one ally of the Németh government. The institutional foundation of the still extant scientific and cultural relations between Austria and Hungary was also established in this period. He was a Minister of Science and Research, then Minister of Education and Culture. From 1991 to 1995, he was the Vice-Chancellor and, at the same time, the national president of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), the larger party of the Austrian government. Subsequently, he established the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative programme and supported the Czech, Slovak, Polish, and above all, Hungarian cultural policy actions. From 2000 to 2012, he chaired the Alpbach Forum organising Italian, Austrian, and Southeast European cultural policy programmes.

Harmathy Attila (1937)

Attila Harmathy is a Széchenyi Prize-winning jurist, a Professor Emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University, and an authority on comparative civil law both at an international level and in Hungary. He was a Constitutional Tribunal judge (1998–2007), and the former Dean of the Faculty of Law (1990–1993). He completed his tertiary studies at the Eötvös Loránd University, attended a law course at the University of Cambridge, and studied for four years (1964–1967) at the International University of Comparative Law in Strasbourg. From 1962, he worked at the Institute of Political Science and Law of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. From 1974, he was a part-time and later a full-time associate professor at Eötvös Loránd University. In 1982, he became a full university professor. He was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1993 and a full member in 1998. Between May 1993 and February 1995, he was the Deputy Secretary-General of the Academy and Vice-President from 1996 to 1999. He took part in several international joint research projects and was a visiting professor at many foreign universities. He was the keynote speaker at the World Congress of Comparative Law in Utrecht in 2006 and at the European Legal Forum in Budapest in 2010. He was engaged in the preparatory work and elaboration of several laws and regulations, including the Civil Code of Hungary and the Law on the Academy.

Janusz K. Kozłowski (1936)

Janusz K. Kozłovski is a Professor Emeritus at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the president of the Second Department of the Academy. Furthermore, he is an honorary president of the International Association of Academies. For several decades, he paid particular attention to scientific cooperation between Poland and Hungary, including the continuous implementation of bilateral archaeological research programmes. In addition to Poland, he led joint research projects in Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, and Morocco. He is specialised in transitional periods: the expansion of Homo sapiens at the turn of the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, the spread of food production at the turn of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic, as well as the transformation of social relations at the turn of the Neolithic and Copper Age. His investigations in Hungary carried out together with the researchers of the Institute of Archaeological Sciences at the Eötvös Loránd University were also related to these research areas. He has been awarded numerous professional recognitions for his scholarly achievements.

Ron Akehurst

Ron Akehurst is a professor at the University of Sheffield, an internationally renowned researcher in health economics and health technology assessment. Professor Akehurst founded the world-famous School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) at the University of Sheffield and was a founding member of the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE), the UK’s centre for health technology assessment, which is a point of reference for many countries. He was the first chairman of the International Advisory Board of the Department of Health Policy and Health Economics at the ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences established in 2010. With his decades of international experience, he helped to design the educational strategy of the Faculty and to launch the Health Policy, Panning, and Financing Master’s programme. He has significantly contributed to transforming the content of the training into an English-language international course from this academic year onwards, reflecting the health care of low- and middle-income countries.

David Andreu

David Andreu is a professor at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is specialised in organic chemistry, biomolecular chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry, and immunochemistry. An outstanding area of his research activity is focused on synthetic antigens. He has been working on the development of protein- and peptide-based compounds that can be used as artificial vaccines and as diagnostic material for developing immunity against the foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV), herpes simplex virus, and HIV-1 virus, as well as for early detection of infections. He has inexhaustible merits in the establishment of the first EU-Tempus consortium (1991–1994) in Hungary, with the participation of the Department of Organic Chemistry at the ELTE Faculty of Science, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Barcelona. Between 2001 and 2005, the EU Cost Chemistry programme was also implemented under the supervision of ELTE professors and with the collaboration of Professor Andreu’s laboratory. He was a guest lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University on multiple occasions.

Rainer Pitschas (1944)

Rainer Pitschas, Professor Emeritus of the German University of Public Administration (Speyer), is a recognised scholar of the German and European science of public administration and administrative law. He is one of the most prominent experts in healthcare and social law in Germany. He was engaged in the renewal and modernisation of the administrative systems of many countries in Europe and Asia. Professor Pitschas developed close relationships with the ELTE Faculty of Law – particularly with the Department of Administrative Law due to his main fields of research – in the second half of the 1990s. He supported the further training of many ELTE faculty members in Speyer and helped to strengthen academic collaboration. He also promoted work at the ELTE Department of Administrative Law by donating valuable works of scholarly literature.

Pertti Torstila (1946)

Pertti Torstila has been striving for strengthening Hungarian–Finnish relations for decades: from 1976 to 1978 as the Secretary of the Finnish Embassy in Budapest, and from 1992 to 1996 as Ambassador. Following the end of his term as Ambassador to Hungary, he was the Political Director (1996–2000) and then the Deputy State Secretary at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. From 2002 to 2006, he was the Ambassador of Finland to Sweden. In 2006, he was appointed Political State Secretary of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. He retired on 1 March 2014. At the end of his tenure as an ambassador in Budapest, in 1996, he was awarded the Middle Cross with the Star of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary.

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936)

Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the best-known and most highly respected Latin American writers. He is one of the most prominent writers of contemporary prose, who has been known to the Hungarian reading public since the 1960s. Right from the onset, not only the readers were interested in works, but also the representatives of Hispanic philology emerging in Hungary at that time. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” Mario Vargas Llosa has visited Hungary several times, most recently as a Guest of Honour Author at the International Book Festival Budapest in 2003. His excellence was previously recognised with a range of literary awards, such as the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Prince of Asturias Award, and the Jerusalem Prize. The oeuvre of Mario Vargas Llosa has been taught at the Spanish Department at the ELTE Faculty of Arts for almost fifty years. His works have been analysed in monographs, studies, and theses by teachers and students, and have been translated by many alumni of the department.

2014

Paolo Aureliano Becchi (1955)

Paolo Aureliano Becchi is a Professor of Law at the University of Genoa and the University of Lucerne. He is a widely known mediator and interpreter of the results of German jurisprudence in his country. He gained considerable international reputation due to his books and conference presentations on Enlightenment legal philosophy and bioethics. He has been studying Hegel’s oeuvre throughout his scholarly career to this day. His translations and analyses of Hegel’s works are regarded as outstanding achievements of legal philosophy in Italy. Becchi’s scientific and educational relations with the Faculty of Law at Eötvös Loránd University go back a decade. He regularly gave lectures and held doctoral courses on legal history and philosophy to ELTE students.

Robert John Weston Evans (1943)

Robert John Weston Evans is a professor of history. In recent years, he has been a teacher at Oriel College and a Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. His research activity focuses on the history of the Habsburg Empire between 1526 and 1918. He is one of the most renowned and most respected researchers of Hungarian history abroad. In his studies, he highlights the role of language in historical development. At present, he is mainly interested in the history of Hungary between 1740 and 1945. He built a major Hungarian community in Oxford and provided extensive support to Hungarian researchers and university students visiting Great Britain. In 1987, he advocated the establishment of the Hungarian Society in Oxford and constantly helped its operation.

Viktor Lechta (1948)

Viktor Lechta founded the Slovak speech therapy training and launched training in clinical speech therapy at the Medical University of Bratislava. He is Vice-President of the Slovak Society for Special Needs Education. During his career, he was a visiting professor at the universities of Budapest, Munich, Vienna, Krakow, and Prague. Since 2006, he has been a professor at the Faculty of Education at Trnava University. His research interests comprise atypical nonverbal behaviour, the diagnosis of communication disorders, integrative therapy for speech disorders, and the theory and conditions for the implementation of inclusive education in practice. Since his university studies, he has maintained close relationship with Hungarian special needs education..

T. Sós Vera (1930)

Vera T. Sós graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in 1952. She was a lecturer at the Department of Analysis I. to 1987 and was the head of the department in the following five years. She contributed significantly to developing the structure and curriculum of the Department of Mathematics established in 1961. She was teaching main introductory courses to analysis for mathematicians, physicists, and mathematics teachers for decades. Her approach to education and her personality rendered her a much respected, legendary teacher. To this day, university textbooks and books written by her are indispensable in teaching mathematics at Eötvös Loránd University. Her research activity is primarily focused on number theory and combinatorics. She is currently one of the most renowned researchers in combinatorics in the world..          

Heinz-Elmar Tenorth (1944)

Heinz-Elmar Tenorth has been a Professor Emeritus at the Humboldt University in Berlin since 2003. He is an internationally renowned creator of a school, specialising in historical pedagogy. He has been a collaborative partner of Eötvös Loránd University for nearly two decades. In addition to the history of education, the joint research is focused on various pedagogical, historical, and anthropological topics and the comparative historical-pedagogical study of the teaching profession. Professor Tenorth also had a fundamental role in developing a methodology for research on the history of education at the department, focusing on the effects of international reception..

Honorary Doctors of Eötvös Loránd University (1847–2020)